Obama '07 video: Shock or schlock?

A videotape surfaced Tuesday of a 2007 speech by then-Sen. Barack Obama in which Obama said that when it came to the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, “the people down in New Orleans, they don’t care about as much.”

In the tape — which was released by conservative news outlet The Daily Caller and Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News on the eve of the first presidential debate — Obama says the government gave aid to the victims of 9/11 and Hurricane Andrew but less to the predominantly minority victims of Katrina.

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The first clip Hannity played — crediting Daily Caller editor Tucker Carlson for getting his hands on the full tape — shows Obama greeting the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in the crowd at the speech, which the then-senator delivered to thousands of African-American religious leaders. Wright’s racially charged sermons became a major flash point during the 2008 campaign.

Wright, Obama said, is “my pastor, the guy who puts up with me, counsels me, listens to my wife complain about me. He’s a friend and a great leader. Not just in Chicago but all across the country.”

But as with other parts of the tape, that quote is not new — Obama’s ad-libbed shout-out made it to No. 3 on a POLITICO list of the top gaffes of the 2008 campaign.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama made clear that he felt the federal government had let down the predominantly minority victims of Hurricane Katrina — so those sentiments also are not new. But Obama’s words in the video come across as much more raw and more visceral than his usual carefully measured words about race.

Some conservatives have long believed that Obama got through the 2008 election without a serious look at his feelings about racial issues, particularly after his GOP rival John McCain took Wright off the table in his own campaign. The tape’s release by a conservative news outlet and a top conservative commentator seemed an attempt to thrust race — and Obama’s views of racial issues — into the 2012 election at a particularly important moment, on the eve of the first presidential debate.

In the view of some on the right, the video shows that Obama’s claim to be a bridge-building unifier on race is less of a genuine conviction than a political expediency — a role he turns on and off to fit the occasion.

The political world was abuzz from the late afternoon into the evening as the Drudge Report teased plans for Fox News and The Daily Caller to release a video of Obama delivering a never-before-seen, racially charged speech. The video would — some on the right asserted — upend the election just as Obama and Mitt Romney prepare to face off in Denver on Wednesday and erase the leads the president holds in most national and battleground state polls.